Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun Investing in Startups

Introduction

How I Became An Angel Investor

ONE DAY DURING my junior year in college, I received a letter from my great-uncle, Dave, inviting me to join him for lunch in New York the following month. It seemed that a few of his close friends would be joining us, which was a bit disappointing, because I enjoyed talking one on one with Uncle Dave. But imagine my surprise when the other three guests arrived and it turned out that every one of them was a Nobel Laureate! How did an immigrant, who grew up in poverty on the Lower East Side of New York City and ended his formal schooling after the ninth grade, end up with friends like this? He was an extraordinary man, an entrepreneur ... and an angel investor.

As an industrious entrepreneur, he founded several companies with his older brother Sam (my grandfather), including one that is still going strong nearly a century later. As a generous philanthropist, he contributed time and money to a host of worthwhile causes.

But the most interesting thing to me about Uncle Dave was his propensity for finding and supporting a wide range of technological innovation. It turns out that this boy from the streets, with little technical education but boundless energy and curiosity, had met with Albert Einstein, and was the closest of friends with Vladimir Zworykin (inventor of the television tube) and Nobel winners like Rosalyn Yalow and I.I. Rabi. He described himself as an innovation catalyst decades before the term angel investor was coined. He ...